Reply #41: No. You obviously don't know any adoptees or women who have

[politicat]

given up children. It's FAR MORE traumatic for all involved. Adoption can and does damage both the child who is given up and the woman who does the giving up. Even the adoptive parents can be damaged, wondering if their child will resent them or want to leave them at some later point. Abortion leaves a sense of loss of potential for most women; giving up a child for adoption leaves her with a sense of loss of an actual person, and self-loathing that she could do so.

Then, there's the selling factor that goes with adoption. It's a business, a trade in human flesh. It may be all prettied up, but you got to be rich to do it; the average adoption costs 10 to 25 grand. Poor, infertile couples can't adopt; they don't make the money, they don't have the right home life, they don't have what the social workers want. It's far more like the slave trade than most people realize. Young women are pressured into these draconian agreements even today, and everyone around them is telling them what to do. There is no objectivity in adoption counseling. The child placement specialist usually has too great a stake in placing a child with a family that's paying to give much attention to the bio-mother who may have doubts. In many adoption circles, the bio-mother is little more than the biblical vessel.

Adoption is not a middle ground.

Besides: we have 1 million abortions a year. We have 600,000 kids in foster care. We have 75,000 approved adoptive homes and another estimated 100,000 families going outside the US to adopt because they can't get an infant or toddler in the US. That's 175,000 potential homes.

Please explain, in multiple paragraphs, what you plan to do with the other 825,000 babies born each year if abortion were not allowed and adoption, the middle ground, was? Are we bringing back orphanages? That's pretty much what group homes are now, but without the title. Or are we going to have a national baby lottery, where 825,000 homes get a kid dropped on their doorstep, whether they want one or not? Or do we go back to the 19th century, stop vaccinating for measles and chicken pox and rubella and scarlet fever and let these diseases carry off a quarter of the children? Let starvation take another quarter, and throw them to work at age 12, to join gangs and support themselves with prostitution and gambling? What would you do? How do we pay for it?

Say we do bring back state and federal orphanages: Please remember, these institutions will be producing 825,000 people without religious indoctrination because no state or federal institution can force religion upon anyone. This would be the fastest way to a purely secular society possible. (Hey... this mightn't be a bad idea....)

And of course, there better be an increase in federal Pregnancy Police funding. Because it's going to take 6 big burlies to make me pee on a stick.